As sharing and the adoption of new, free licenses begins to accelerate, I believe we are in danger of creating sloppy licenses or incompatible licenses backed by torrents of content funded by well-meaning governments, non-profits, users and even commercial entities. Poorly drafted licenses, licenses that are not adequately stewarded or supported by a dedicated team of legal experts, content encumbered by onerous neighboring rights and isolated and restrictive licenses can create mountains of unusable content which we might call “free” but which for all practical purposes become puddles of unusable content and what we would call “failed sharing”.

As Ito points out, Creative Commons has the benefit of learning from previous license movements in making sure our licenses not only fill a specific need but also have low transaction costs and high interoperability. As request for additional features arise, we remain focused on feedback from our community to make sure we provide as many functional options as possible while keeping things simple. Read the full post for more.

Last month the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) sent an ill-advised fundraising letter to its members, signed by the organization’s president. The letter made obviously false and easily rebutted claims about Creative Commons and was lambasted across the net. See our response for links.

Now the ASCAP president has posted an equally misinformed letter on the ASCAP website. Summary: The anti-copyright “copyleft” movement is attempting to silence me!

Every bit of this is incorrect. To the extent there is a single movement the ASCAP president is attempting to criticize, it would be called the free culture movement. Presumably the ASCAP president thinks “copyleft” sounds more threatening than “free culture”. But copyleft, or a licensing requirement to share adaptations with the same freedoms as a source work, is one mechanism used to protect free culture (in the Creative Commons license suite we call this mechanism ShareAlike), and as a copyright licensing mechanism, it builds on copyright.

Furthermore, nobody in the free culture movement is attempting to silence the ASCAP president. The remedy for misinformation is more information–last month’s ASCAP fundraising letter was linked by many free culture blogs, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig offered to debate the ASCAP president (incidentally, the ASCAP president’s latest letter claims that Lessig is a founder of the “copyleft movement”–also not true; Lessig is arguably a founder of the free culture movement, but to the extent there is a copyleft movement, its founder would clearly be Richard Stallman), and right here, we’re linking to the ASCAP president’s letter–go read it, blog about it, post the link–make sure the ASCAP president is not silenced!

The report also features a letter from Dame Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, closing with the following:

There is a supreme irony that just as technology is allowing greater access to books and other creative works than ever before for education and research, new restrictions threaten to lock away digital content in a way we would never countenance for printed material.

Let’s not wake up in five years’ time and realise we have unwittingly lost a fundamental building block for innovation, education and research in the UK. Who is protecting the public interest in the digital world? We need to redefine copyright in the digital age and find a balance to benefit creators, educators, researchers, the creative industries – and the knowledge economy.

It would be difficult to state the fundamentals of what is at stake more clearly than this–globally. While some of the essays touch on specific issues in UK copyright, researchers, educators, and citizens everywhere will gain relevant insight from the report.

One of the report’s contributors, Cameron Neylon, has used the choice offered by the range of Creative Commons tools to release his contribution of all copyright hindrances via the CC0 public domain waiver. Read Neylon’s essay and the entire report–and share!

Creative Commons is deeply honored to announce CERN corporate support at the “creator level”. CERN is one of the world’s premier scientific institutions–home of the Large Hadron Collider and birthplace of the web. This donation comes on the occasion of the publication under Creative Commons licenses of the first results of LHC experiments.

Dr. Salvatore Mele, CERN Head of Open Access, provided the following statement:

The High-Energy Physics community in general, and the frontier experiments it runs at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN aim to unravel the mysteries of the universe. This major ambition can only be reached on foundations of technology and innovation, collaboration and partnership, and perhaps above all, on shared information, which is why this community has strived at Open Access to its scientific results since decades already.

CERN has become a supporter of Creative Commons to acknowledge the contribution that its licenses make to accelerating scientific communication and simplifying the way researchers share their work. The Creative Commons Attribution license is an important tool for the publication of CERN’s experimental results.

The Catalyst Grant program wouldn’t be possible without the support of the 254 individual donors who helped us raise that amount, 100% of which goes to our grant program. If you’d like to contribute, you can still do so via our Donate page and designate “Catalyst Grant program” in the comment box for your contribution to go to this initiative.

The range of topics covered by the projects is quite impressive, and as we spend the next month reviewing the applications, we welcome you, the community, to join us in having a look as well. On each grant application page, there is a large “Discuss” button which allows you to share your input and read other comments. If you have suggestions for how to improve and develop these proposals, please feel welcome to add your thoughts.

In addition to the community’s input, Creative Commons will lead a review process together with a regional committee comprised of CC representatives from Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Latin and North America. The Catalyst Grant campaign was inspired by the fantastic grant programs run by the Wikimedia Foundation and Rising Voices.

Thanks to all the grant applicants and donors for a successful campaign! We look forward to the results of the review, which will be announced in August.